I’ve needed to write something similar to this down before. Since I got used to that dance, it hasn’t been much hassle to keep VMWare humming away on my Fedora laptop. Maybe that’s because I don’t use it as heavily as I used to. Today I wanted to use the Workstation client to control my ESXi server. And it wouldn’t launch at all. Not only that, the vmware-modconfig tool I usually use to restore functionality started dying with SIGSEGV every time I tried to run it.

Looking manually for updates showed a new, paid upgrade to Workstation Pro 16 awaiting me. I really don’t want to shave an extra yak today, though, and it’s not even a lock v16 will fix this issue, since Fedora isn’t all that well supported. With less and less need for me to virtualize desktops nowadays, this value proposition is really starting to slide down toward “just move them to KVM and be done” much faster than toward “give VMWare more dollars.”

It was only a little bit worse than normal, though, so I am once again going to defer that decision for a while longer. The necessary remedy was hinted at in this issue.

Without a working vmware-modconfig I needed to build and install manually:

# update my checkout of https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules
$ git pull
$ git checkout w15.5.6-k5.8
$ make
$ sudo make install

Then I needed to disable vmware-modconfig so the product would launch

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig_broken
$ sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig

And then it worked again.

This level of hassle was worth it when I needed to virtualize desktops on the regular. Now I’m less certain that it is.

And this isn’t the topic I was anxious to restart the blog with after a summer off.